Culture
A Thriller Wrapped in a Story of Sisters and First Love
As if in opposition to her mom’s perceived flightiness, Angel has been steadfastly dedicated to her wealthy, guitar-strumming boyfriend, Myles Parrish, for 3 years. “Myles was her first. Myles is her solely.” When Angel visits his household at their summer time home simply up the coast, serving to them with chores like placing out the flags on the deck — O’Nan’s eye for tiny particulars is beautiful — she feels a fleeting satisfaction of possession. Nonetheless, Myles will go to varsity subsequent 12 months after which, “she is aware of she’ll lose him to some wealthy lady and there’s nothing she will be able to do.”
Within the fall of 2009, although, the lady threatening their relationship isn’t wealthy in any respect. Birdy Alves is a petite highschool senior who works on the native D’Angelo (a New England chain of sandwich retailers), lives along with her widowed mom and will get good grades. She has a boyfriend, however all she desires is Myles. After we see them collectively of their first hookup on the empty summer time home, Birdy is conscious that she will be able to’t be the primary lady he introduced there, however melts when he “pushes his hair from his face like Keanu.”
Each textual content is a thrill, each wait between communications is torture. When Birdy is kissing Myles on the pinnacle or briefly “allowed to hold on his arm” like an actual girlfriend, O’Nan takes us proper into the disorienting ecstasy of younger love. Myles is the least explored character within the novel; nonetheless, it’s clear he’s not price both of those ladies’ time, not to mention their lives.
The spoiler is in that first sentence, however when Birdy has stated goodbye to her household canine, a cocker named Ofelia (oh the small print!), and headed off to her destiny, a lightweight goes out. We grow to be mourners whereas O’Nan turns his narration to the investigation, to due course of and household wreckage.
Regardless of the style he’s taking part in with — that is his twentieth e book (not counting novellas and collections) — O’Nan is an attractive author, a grasp of the illuminatingly mundane moments. In “Henry Himself” (2019), a prequel to the Maxwell household sequence he began with “Want You Have been Right here” in 2002, the climax, resembling it’s, encompasses a household gathering for a chore, the dismantling of an unneeded rooftop tv antenna. However in a broader sense, he’s there for the societal crumbling, whether or not it’s a seemingly protected middle-class household just like the Maxwells, diminishing from one era to the subsequent, a enterprise closing (“Final Night time on the Lobster”), one other younger assassin’s life story (“The Pace Queen”) or the Alves and Oliviera households falling aside; a part of Marie Oliviera dies that fall when she loses each her innocence and her sister as her fixed.
Culture
How Patrick Mahomes, Chiefs pulled off another magic act, complete with a doink
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — You just knew they were going to win. The Chiefs knew they were going to win. The fans inside Arrowhead Stadium knew it. Perhaps most of the millions of people watching “Sunday Night Football” on NBC did, too.
Whether you love them or hate them — or are just tired of them — the Chiefs won, yet again, in another close game that left their opponent, this time the Los Angeles Chargers, shaking their heads.
The Chiefs are a high-wire circus act. They don’t just execute the trick of winning one-score game after one-score game. No. They must increase the danger, decrease their odds of a successful landing and find a new way to escape embarrassment.
“As long as we have a chance to go out there and have the ball and make a play happen, I feel like we’re going to make it happen,” quarterback Patrick Mahomes said.
Instead of a comfortable, dominant win over a divisional rival, the Chiefs blew a 13-point lead in the second half before Mahomes became a magician in the game’s most critical moments to once again lead his teammates to a dramatic comeback win, 19-17 over the Chargers.
Mahomes, though, didn’t score the game-winning points. Coach Andy Reid decided to have Mahomes, once he drove the offense into the red zone, kneel twice before calling a timeout with one second left on the clock to set up a game-winning field goal for Matthew Wright, the Chiefs’ third-string kicker. Then Reid decided not to watch Wright attempt his 31-yard kick. Reid kept his face forward as if staring into a void. The joke was on Reid, who had to be told that the ball hit the inside of the left upright before going through. The moment led starting kicker Harrison Butker — out with a left knee injury — to smile and laugh.
“I wanted it to go right down the middle, obviously,” Wright said. “I’m just happy it went in. … I don’t like to think about hitting the upright.”
Unreal 🤯 pic.twitter.com/Wx4a3YhaR1
— NFL (@NFL) December 9, 2024
Within minutes of his game-winning doink, Wright was on the field for NBC’s postgame interview next to Mahomes and pass rusher Chris Jones. Wright, who joined the Chiefs two weeks ago, was one of the first players to don a crisp new black ballcap, the commemorative item in honor of the team being crowned as champion of the AFC West for the ninth consecutive season.
The Chiefs entered Sunday with 14 consecutive victories in games decided by one score, the longest streak in NFL history.
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But as the Chiefs aim to capture an unprecedented third straight Super Bowl victory, this season has been about the team’s last-second victories, each one seemingly weirder than the last. Including Sunday, half of the Chiefs’ 12 victories this season have been decided on the final play — Ravens tight end Isaiah Likely’s right big toe being out of bounds instead of a touchdown as time expired, Butker’s game-winning kick over the Bengals, running back Kareem Hunt’s touchdown in overtime over the Buccaneers, linebacker Leo Chenal’s diving block in the win over the Broncos and kicker Spencer Shrader’s field goal over the Panthers.
“I’d much rather it be like this — and win games and find new ways to win — than to be losing them,” tight end Travis Kelce said. “Looking at it from last year, one of the biggest things was being able to calm the storm that’s around us and focus on us and keep getting better. This is just another version of that, trying to find ways to win and keep finding ways to get better, so at the end of the season we’re playing our best ball.”
This “How ‘bout those Chiefs!” means even more 🏆 pic.twitter.com/huqt8s9QKh
— Kansas City Chiefs (@Chiefs) December 9, 2024
The Chiefs offense still isn’t humming. For the second consecutive week, the Chiefs scored only one touchdown. Inserting veteran D.J. Humphries at left tackle didn’t fix the offensive issues. Humphries did his best to help stabilize the offensive line, but Mahomes was hit a season-high 13 times by the Chargers. Given the circumstances, Mahomes was still brilliant when necessary, especially when he was hit or about to get hit.
“We’ve played a lot of good defenses,” Mahomes said. “That’s the one bad thing when you win the Super Bowl: You play the best schedule. We’ve played a lot of good defensive ends, defensive linemen. For myself, it’s just finding the soft spot in the pocket. On some of the early third downs, I was kind of running into (pressure). I thought I did better as the game went on.”
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The Chiefs’ final drive began with less than five minutes left. Mahomes was put at a disadvantage: He would be forced to pass the ball over and over again and the Chargers knew they would have plenty of opportunities to rush him in hopes of generating a negative player or a game-winning turnover.
Then Mahomes was at his slippery best. On third-and-10 from the Chiefs’ 4o-yard line, Mahomes evaded three defenders in the pocket, moved to his left and jumped to complete a 14-yard pass to rookie Xavier Worthy.
Mahomes things 🤷♂️ pic.twitter.com/fFF1YhaamM
— NFL (@NFL) December 9, 2024
On third- and fourth-down plays this season, Mahomes has generated 50 total expected points added, according to TruMedia. No other quarterback has more than 33 total expected points added (Buffalo’s Josh Allen).
But after the next snap, the difficulty increased for Mahomes: Humphries left the game with a hamstring injury. He was replaced by Wanya Morris, a second-year player who allowed 11 pressures on 48 pass-blocking snaps the previous week in the Chiefs’ win over the Las Vegas Raiders.
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“I wanted to show why I was there in the first place and why this team trusted me,” Morris said. “It’s definitely good to put last week behind me, but not to forget that embarrassment that I felt. I feel that’s very essential to me growing.”
Mahomes’ final third-down snap began at the Chargers’ 20-yard line after the two-minute warning. With the Chargers having exhausted their timeouts, some teams would’ve elected to run the ball to keep the clock running. Before the Chiefs’ third-and-7 snap, Mahomes said one sentence to Reid to help convince him to call a pass play.
“I’ll make something happen,” Mahomes told Reid.
When the play needs to be made, 1️⃣5️⃣ makes the play. pic.twitter.com/TIEKFwmPgk
— NFL (@NFL) December 9, 2024
Mahomes made sure the Chargers never got the ball again. He rolled to his right and waited long enough — and avoiding linebacker Daiyan Henley — to find Kelce for a 9-yard completion.
“I thought the Chargers did a nice job,” Reid said. “They zoned us off. That’s more of a (play against man-to-man coverage). They had been playing man up to that point. If they would’ve done that, it would’ve been a great call.”
Not surprisingly, Mahomes was assisted by his wild card of a teammate in Kelce, who improvised his route.
“He’s supposed to run a corner route,” Mahomes said of Kelce with a blank expression. “It is what it is. I went through my reads. As I went to get ready to run, I just saw (No.) 87 just sitting right there in the middle of the field.”
Kelce didn’t reveal what led him to change his route or how he did it to surprise the Chargers. Kelce did share that, unlike Reid, he watched Wright make the winning kick.
“Oh, yeah, I saw it hit the upright,” Kelce said. “The bank is open on Sundays, man.”
(Photo of Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce: Jamie Squire / Getty Images)
Culture
How Netflix Took on the Magic of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’
The town of Macondo never existed. It was never supposed to. And yet, here it is.
The idyllic town in Colombia was the imaginary setting for “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” the 1967 novel that helped Gabriel García Márquez win the Nobel Prize and that, over the years, led to many offers from Hollywood to create an adaptation.
The author always refused, insisting that his novel, in which the real and fantastical converge, could never be rendered onscreen. His Macondo, he said, could never be built.
But now, in a rambling field outside the city of Ibagué, stands Macondo. Built by Netflix from the ground up for the first-ever screen adaptation of the novel, the town has real birds nesting in its trees and dogs wandering its narrow streets.
García Márquez did not want Hollywood to make a movie from his book, his son Rodrigo García said, because he could not picture English-speaking actors playing the Buendías, the family at the center of the novel. Nor could he see the epic story being squeezed into two hours — or three, or four, for that matter.
And then there was the issue of magical realism, which the author used to conjure his experience of Latin America’s capricious, stranger-than-fiction reality.
In the novel, which opens in the 19th century, the people of Macondo marvel at things already considered ordinary elsewhere: a daguerreotype machine, magnets, ice. But no one questions the presence of a ghost — or whether a baby can be born with the tail of a pig or flowers fall like rain from the sky.
Onscreen, magical realism has proved notoriously hard to replicate: The visual effects used to create such images in the past tipped at times into fantasy or horror, or just looked silly. The 2007 film adaptation of “Love in the Time of Cholera,” the author’s other best-known book, was a box-office flop.
But in the decade since García Márquez died, much has changed and, in a turn he could not have imagined, Netflix has been able to overcome his old objections.
For one, the streaming giant could make a big-budget adaptation of the novel in Spanish, having proved the global appeal of Latin American content with hits like “Narcos” and “Roma.”
Netflix could also make a series, not a film, giving the plot more room to stretch out. Finally, it could film it in the author’s native Colombia, with mostly Colombian actors, said Francisco Ramos, the company’s vice president of content for Latin America. Netflix could make “Cien Años de Soledad,” not “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
The author’s family said yes, and the first season, made up of eight hourlong episodes, airs on Dec. 11. The second is in progress.
García, the author’s son, said the family had agreed in part because they felt a series could produce “the sensation of having experienced 100 years of life,” which is a hallmark of the book, he said.
“That, to me, is what’s important,” he said. “It’s the total experience of immersing yourself.”
And so now, Macondo — and a studious replica of the Buendía home, sheltered beneath a hangar — have become reality.
They are so real, so immersive, in fact, that sometimes the actors aren’t sure where the fiction begins or ends.
On a recent afternoon, as the actor who plays an older Úrsula, the Buendía matriarch, prepared to shoot a scene in the kitchen, she held out an egg before cracking it on a bowl and laughed.
“Is it real, or is it fake?” asked the actor, Marleyda Soto.
A total commitment to recreating reality, or the novel’s version of reality, would guide their work, the creators decided. With that, would they — finally — get magical realism right?
Inside Macondo
In Colombia, where García Márquez appears on the currency, many people can recite his book’s opening lines: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
In the series, the scene lets viewers see how what might appear ordinary elsewhere is often experienced as magical in Macondo, a town isolated by a dense jungle swamp near the Caribbean coast.
When ice comes to the town for the first time, it is not just a novelty, a sign of modernity, but an otherworldly spectacle. Mirroring the author’s elaborate description of the moment, and hewing closely to the text, the filmmakers create a theatrical scene in which light and shadow evoke an almost religious experience.
Seeing Ice
When it was opened by the giant, the chest gave off a glacial exhalation. Inside there was only an enormous, transparent block with infinite internal needles in which the light of the sunset was broken up into colored stars. Disconcerted, knowing that the children were waiting for an immediate explanation, José Arcadio Buendía ventured a murmur:
“It’s the largest diamond in the world.”
“No,” the gypsy countered. “It’s ice.”
1970 translation by Gregory Rabassa
The ice also signals the arrival of the first outsiders to Macondo. They are a troupe of gypsies who bring the esoteric knowledge — and basic scientific instruments — that charm José Arcadio, the Quixote-like family patriarch.
He eventually sets to work on alchemy, melting down his wife’s gold coins and leaving his family to fend for itself. While his head is buried in a book, one of his sons runs off with the gypsies. Later, his daughter nearly floats off in her bassinet. He casually pulls her down, more annoyed by the distraction than amazed.
Like other scenes where the impossible occurs, the moment is presented in the series without drama or fanfare, much as it is in the novel by the author.
The Floating Basket
One day Amaranta’s basket began to move by itself and made a complete turn about the room, to the consternation of Aureliano, who hurried to stop it. But his father did not get upset. He put the basket in its place and tied it to the leg of a table…
1970 translation by Gregory Rabassa
That approach was part of “visually capturing a special book,” said Alex García López, one of the first season’s two directors. “This is the culture of the Caribbean,” he said, where Catholic mysticism mingles with Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean beliefs about life and death, the body and the soul.
Portraying reality as it is experienced by the characters became the guiding vision of the project, said García López. What is familiar, what is theirs, is taken for granted; the new enchants and ultimately destroys.
That is strong social commentary. It is also playful, said García López, who is from Argentina. “It’s typical of Latin America,” he said, “to think that everything that comes from abroad is better than what we have at home.”
The next figures to bring the outside world to Macondo are a magistrate from the capital and a priest, the personification of politics and organized religion.
Against the wishes of the Buendías, they transform the town, painting houses in the blue of their political party and erecting a church. Like the gypsies, they also claim one of the family’s sons, who will head to war.
Most of the first season is devoted to telling this story.
“Ninety percent of the book, and the series, deals with Colombian history and the domestic passions and traumas of this family,” said José Rivera, the screenwriter and playwright who produced the first draft of the screenplay.
“When the magic does happen, it’s startling,” he said. “It’s gorgeous, because it falls in the middle of very everyday realism.”
A scene where Úrsula learns of the death of one of her sons is an example of magic taking place within ordinary daily life. A trickle of his blood travels through the town to reach her.
The Trickle of Blood
A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta’s chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.
1970 translation by Gregory Rabassa
Úrsula is shocked not by the journey the blood has taken, but by the ominous message she sees in it. It is “her sixth sense” made visible, said García López, who directed the scene.
Flesh and Blood
To keep the production grounded in the characters’ reality, the filmmakers shot the scenes involving magical realism in front of the camera, avoiding visual effects whenever possible, said Laura Mora, who is co-directing the series.
“That had to do with a formal decision on our part,” Mora said. “‘Everything has to feel very homemade, very analog, very, very on-camera.’”
So, for example, the ghost that haunts the Buendías was not a translucent apparition made in postproduction, the directors said. He was a flesh-and-blood actor — with lots of blood.
Likewise, the scene in which the town’s priest levitates after drinking hot chocolate was not filmed in a studio against a screen. The actor was hauled up right on the set, using ropes and harnesses.
And in the memorable scene when it rains flowers, thousands of real (and plastic) flowers truly did fall from above while the cameras were rolling.
Mora said the hope was that if the magical scenes looked just like the rest of the drama, they would be more convincing.
“For the actors, that was delightful, because everything was happening on the set,” Mora said. No one had to be told to imagine things that were not there, she said. “That was really beautiful.”
A Homage to Colombia
The town of Macondo embodies the commitment Netflix made to the author’s family when it got the rights to the book in 2018.
No series on this scale had been made in Colombia before. In building the town, an effort that took hundreds of workers more than a year, Netflix gave reality to a bygone world, recreating the Colombia that García Márquez had created, down to the details.
On a recent, sweltering afternoon, Bárbara Enríquez walked through Macondo, a set she helped create as one of the two production designers on the series. She pointed to a towering rubber tree, which was all that had stood in the field before.
Now it was the center of a town filled with buildings modeled on architectural styles from the 19th century, she said: vernacular, Colonial, Republican. There was the book’s bordello and bar, Catarino’s, its school, hotel and church. Dozens of species of plants were shipped in by the landscape designer to recreate the flora of the Caribbean coast.
Enríquez, who designed the set for the 2018 film “Roma,” stepped into the town’s general store.
Her team scoured the country for the antique furniture on the set. She pointed to a woven basket: They commissioned Colombian craftspeople to weave them, along with hats, hammocks and the distinctive shoulder bags known as mochilas.
To recreate Macondo, Netflix also relied on museums, documents, researchers and historians. The costume designer used drawings made by a 19th-century traveler and a government commission to create a wardrobe of thousands of garments.
“In the end,” said Enríquez, “‘One Hundred Years’ is a homage to Colombia.”
The creative crew had to sit down for Colombian history lessons, learning about the Thousand Days’ War, the brutal civil conflict that plays a pivotal role in the first season.
The actors had to learn to speak in the regional Costeño accent, and also to write longhand, in ink, to sew and embroider. They took to calling it “The School of One Hundred Years.”
In the process, everyone on set learned that many scenes from the book that appear fantastical were part of García Márquez’s life.
In his writings, the author revealed it was his sister who, like a little girl adopted by the Buendías, ate dirt. And there really was a priest in the region who was said to levitate when he drank wine from the chalice. (García Márquez said he swapped the wine for hot chocolate because he found that more believable.)
“You realize, OK, what he’s doing here is he is narrating the stories of the world he was born into,” Mora, the director, said. “Magical realism is a name that the academics have applied.”
The cast, most of whom are Colombian like Mora, came to see the series that way, too — as a way of bringing to life not only a fiction born from one man’s imagination, but also their country’s rich, if painful, history, and its inimitable culture.
Because of the care brought to that effort, the details accumulate to make Macondo seem real, said Enríquez, the production designer. “They may not all be seen, but they can be felt.”
The first season recreates the 19th century; the second will follow Macondo into the 20th. Enríquez said she hoped the deeply researched production would work like a time machine, making Colombians say, “That’s right, it was just like that.”
In the end, “you enter into the fiction,” she said. “Everyone enters the world of the fiction, and you embrace it.”
Culture
Conor Niland’s book ‘The Racket’ documents fear and loathing on the tennis tour
When Conor Niland picked up £30,000 for winning the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award three weeks ago, it was double his biggest payday throughout a seven-year professional tennis career.
This neatly encompasses what Niland’s award-winning book, “The Racket”, is all about — the reality of being a tennis player outside the elite. For players like Niland, who reached a career high of world No. 129 and never went further than the first round at a major, Grand Slam glamour gives way to the grind of the second-tier (Challenger) and third-tier (ITF) tours, crisscrossing the world on cheap flights — and one hair-raising drive through the Uzbekistan countryside without a seatbelt.
The Racket covers a side of tennis often overshadowed by bigger events and more famous names, which is part of the reason it has captured the imagination not just of the sport’s own fans but of the wider sporting public. “It’s very accessible to people who don’t follow tennis, but it isn’t watered-down in any way for those who do know and understand the sport,” Niland says in a Zoom interview at the start of December.
Part of what makes the Ireland Davis Cup captain’s book so fascinating is his discussion of the mental challenges of tennis, which are varied and intense. Niland sees the book as a counterweight to “Open”, eight-time Grand Slam champion Andre Agassi’s searingly honest 2009 autobiography which deals with similar themes but focuses on the top of tennis. It also has kinship with “Challengers”, the Zendaya tennis movie centered on a top pro tennis player trying to return to glory on the Challenger circuit.
“You’re in your head a lot, that’s for sure,” Niland says, explaining that musicians and actors who are hoping to ‘make it’ have reached out after feeling kinship with his story. “You’re on your own. And you’ve got an awful lot of time to reflect … Tennis asks so much of you.”
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Niland, 43, turned pro in 2005.
He qualified for two Grand Slams but lost in the first round of both. He blew a 4-1 final set lead against Frenchman Adrian Mannarino at Wimbledon in 2011; had he won, he would have played Roger Federer in the next round. He then had to retire with food poisoning while trailing Novak Djokovic 6-0, 5-1 on Arthur Ashe Stadium at that year’s U.S. Open. Those two defeats were his biggest career payouts, ahead of winning the Israel Open Challenger event in 2010 — until last month’s William Hill award.
Niland, as a promising 12-year-old from a country with negligible tennis pedigree, beat Federer in a friendly at the Winter Cup youth tournament in 1994. He trained at the Nick Bollettieri academy in Florida with Serena Williams, before competing on the U.S. college tennis circuit for the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied English literature and language.
He retired, aged 30, in 2012 because of a persistent hip injury but didn’t start writing his book for another eight years. Niland started jotting down some thoughts during the Covid-19 lockdown and found that they were gushing out of him; a few weeks later, he had a book proposal from publisher Penguin. Irish sportswriter Gavin Cooney was a ghostwriter on the project, but much of the writing is Niland’s own.
He feels tennis is a misunderstood sport: a profession in which around 100 men and women can make a decent living each year while thousands of others play for little reward. “It’s not good enough that there aren’t 300, 400 people in the world, men and women, who can make a very decent income,” Niland says, pointing to golf as an example of a sport with a better remuneration structure. Ultimately, only 128 men and women can be in any Grand Slam event’s draw, which makes getting those bigger paydays harder.
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This creates a brutal hierarchy, which is at the heart of The Racket. Niland paints a vivid picture of tennis’ haves and have-nots, documenting a training session with idol Pete Sampras among portraits of the myriad characters all the way down the sport’s rungs. Niland’s peers crave support and success, while the likes of Agassi and Sampras occupy another universe; he recalls Agassi surrounded at a tournament by so many hangers-on that he accepts a glass of water he doesn’t really want, just to give them something to do.
What Niland also captures is that players, even greats such as Sampras and Agassi, don’t breathe that rarefied air from the start; he uses current world No. 10 Grigor Dimitrov as an example of how the tennis hierarchy moves. He recalls getting on well with Dimitrov when the Bulgarian was a wide-eyed teenager who proudly declared that “(Maria) Sharapova likes me, man”, before explaining that Dimitrov became more distant as he rose up the food chain. “By the time he had cracked the top 20, he was ignoring me completely,” he writes.
There is scarcely more friendliness among players of the same level, though, especially on the Challenger and ITF Tours where people are fighting for their livelihoods as well as their ranking points. “Locker rooms on the lesser tours are full of strangers with bad tattoos,” Niland writes. “Everyone is just polite enough not to call one another out for being an a**hole, but selfishness is rewarded. Everyone is in competition with one another and on the lookout for a weakness in everybody else.”
These are power structures that people who have never gone near tennis can relate to, whether on the corporate ladder or in social groups. In tennis, as in all fields of life, “you’re constantly self-analyzing,” Niland says.
The tensions intrinsic to these hierarchies have boiled over in the past few months in the wake of high-profile doping cases involving men’s world No. 1 Jannik Sinner and women’s world No. 2 Iga Swiatek. Tennis players and fans largely accept that it is a tiered sport: the top players aren’t just paid more on and off the court, but receive preferential treatment in terms of court allocations and appearance fees.
Low-level players who do make it into bigger tournaments won’t get picked for show courts equipped with roofs for when it rains; they are less likely to make deep runs and so rarely know when their matches will be scheduled or how long they’ll be at a tournament for. An early defeat can mean a panic to change flights and an unexpected series of wins can mean scrambling for a new hotel room. The Challenger and ITF or ‘Futures’ circuits are played at small venues with modest facilities and few spectators.
The Racket sees Niland recount Federer summoning the British player Dan Evans to his base in Dubai for a few weeks of off-season workouts, insisting that every practice match be at 7 p.m. local time. Federer knew he would play the first match of his next tournament three weeks before the tournament even started.
Players accept these kinds of privileges. Things get heated when people perceive the accepted double standards in other realms.
Several of Sinner’s peers vented their frustration in August when he was not banned after twice testing positive for the banned substance clostebol, even though the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) followed due process throughout an investigation that led to a “no fault or negligence” verdict. Sinner received a provisional suspension for each positive test, but quickly and successfully appealed on both occasions, meaning he could keep playing without the bans being made public until the conclusion of the ITIA’s investigation.
‘One rule for them, another for us’ was the essential complaint. In November, Swiatek’s positive test for trimetazidine (TMZ) from contaminated melatonin (sleeping tablets) medication led to a month’s ban. Swiatek also quickly and successfully appealed her provisional suspension, which the ITIA issued in September.
On this occasion, lower-ranked players emphasized that only elite players like Sinner and Swiatek can afford the swift legal and medical advice and testing required to appeal their provisional suspensions. Players only have a 10-day window and ITIA chief executive Karen Moorhouse accepted that players with more resources are better positioned to deal with incidents like this.
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Niland feels the segregation of the Challenger and ITF Tours “downgrades” tennis outside of the rankings’ top 100s and “makes it seem like we’re not legitimate professionals,” describing the Swiatek case as a “perfect example” of why tennis is perceived to be a two-tier sport.
“The fact that they’re able to announce to the world on their terms on their own Instagram page … Tennis has a bad habit of thinking the very best players in the sport are the sport and that they’re bigger than the sport. It’s the way these things are managed and the feeling that it’s the haves and the have-nots,” he says.
Niland never directly witnessed doping but was once approached to fix a match by an anonymous caller. He hung up the phone.
Unable to afford the entourage and support teams of the best players, Niland describes the “crushing” loneliness and isolation of being a lower-ranked tennis player.
“I made virtually no lasting friendships on tour through my seven years, despite coming across hundreds of players my own age living the same life as my own,” he writes. Players who do strike up bonds, such as Dane Sweeny and Calum Puttergill, two Australians who document their seasons on YouTube, spend time figuring out if they can afford to lose a match or not.
Niland also recalls the unhealthy obsession with one’s ranking — the digits that measure a player’s sense of self-worth. He says he still gets a “flash of adrenaline” when he sees the number 129, say on a digital clock, remembering the constant fretting about losing points won the previous year.
“By September, you’re already thinking about the points you might lose in February,” he says.
“You’re dealing with losing constantly and constantly trying to get better and comparing yourself with the very best in the world,” he says, explaining that the intertwining of results with self-esteem was the worst part of the job.
And the best? “It was great to wake up with a dream every day — mine was to play at the Grand Slams. The fact I actually got to do it was great, even though it was bittersweet.”
Niland hopes The Racket humanizes the players below the sport’s top 100, explaining that one of the biggest misconceptions about tennis is the perceived gulf in talent between the elite and those just below them. It’s a much smaller gap than people think, he says, and very small margins can determine a player’s career trajectory.
Nowadays, Niland is the Irish Davis Cup captain, but his main job is with a commercial real estate company.
He lives in Dublin with his wife and kids (Emma, eight, and six-year-old Tom), all of whom play tennis, something he very rarely does anymore. Full-time coaching doesn’t appeal, but he would love to keep writing, with the work on this book helping him to process his gruelling first career: “I think some of the ‘failures’ in the book are what makes it more compelling and the fact that there isn’t necessarily a happy ending for me in the tennis context. I guess the happy ending is this book.
“Tennis can offer you something — you might get bits and pieces out of it, but it’s not necessarily going to save you.”
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Dan Goldfarb)
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